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I sure hope this is the right place to post this, sorry up front if it is not!

I am in the process of painting my Boba Fett armor. And I've stumbled across a rather annoying problem. I don't have these huge nice areas to paint in, and it's way too freezing outside to paint there yet. (This needs to be done by the end of March, sadly.) So I am painting inside a room where the window is wide open to get fresh air now and then. Anyway. What happens is that while I paint, dust as a tendency to stick to the paint, and this is a huge pain in the a**! Do you have any good solutions to get rid of the dust once it's stuck? It's not a LOT, but enough for me to see it up close. Help! Will the finish satin coat cover over this or?
Thank you in advance

Ok, new problem. When I look at pictures of other people painting their armor, it looks so nice and shiny, like, not quite metallic, but almost. When I airbrush with my humbrol, it looks so... dry and woolen. Why? It's not the dust alone making it look like this, it's the paint itself. Both the airbrush and paint is completely new. And the layers I mask suddenly look normal, as if the masking liquid helps. So I wonder, do the final coating do the magic, or do I need to lightly buff/polish it with 0000 wool or something?

If you can't stop the dust in the first place ,then the other option is let it dry don't attempt to pick it off tacky , once it's dry give It a light rub down with a very fine steel wool , but you would be better if you could stop the dust , just remember to give it a dust off after to get rid of the steel wool dust

Sadly, there's always dust in a small room, so I can't get rid of it all. It's reeeally fine dust, but it's enough to get stuck in the paint. And if I carefully rub with wool, won't I damage the paint job?

i painted a lot of my armour outside and got dust etc everywhere but to be honest its easy to be precious about it but by the time you're finished it will look like dust is the least of your problems as the armour and helmet is aged, battered and bashed ....

for my final coat i used the company spraybooth at work to apply the mattcoat but its still dusty ...

you can get small Art spraybooths online for a reasonable cost ...

Jawsum said:

Sadly, there's always dust in a small room, so I can't get rid of it all. It's reeeally fine dust, but it's enough to get stuck in the paint. And if I carefully rub with wool, won't I damage the paint job?

- - - Updated - - -

the other thing you can do dumb as it sounds is if you have your hoover/dyson you can set the nozzle to the side of where you are spraying ... it will pull some of the dust away from where you are spraying ....

Any imperfections are painfully obvious on fresh paint, especially if it has a sheen. A coat of Testors Dullcote will make that dust disappear like magic. Or you could rub it with fine steel wool like Icemonkey said. It's up to you. Bottom line, once you start weathering and dirtying everything up, it's not really going to matter.

If i read you right you're saying the images you see of other folks spraying shows shiny paintwork left after each coat?.... i dont think this is a problem .... if the paint is acrylic it will tend to be shiny or if its gloss enamel .... if its matt finish Humbrol paints you are using then A - the paint is meant to be flat and B - the airbrush will have the effect (as its a very very fine spray) of also making the finish seem a bit flat! ...

I used rattlecans and a mix of gloss, satin and matt paints just because that was the only form i could find the colours ... to be honest it doesn't matter at this stage until you do the final clear coat in satin or matt finish (your preference) .... its perfectly fine if the colours are going on dead flat (matt) as it really doesn't make any difference ....

As a caveat to that .. if I don't read you right and what you're saying is that your paint is literally going on 'powdery' and physically creating a 'woolly fluffy' effect then its likely your airbrush thats the issue as the paint is essentially drying in the air before it hits the helmet and what you are building up is layers of speckled semi dry paint .... i would imagine that that is more likely to happen with Humbrol acrylics rather than enamels as they are water based. ... That just means you need to maybe adjust the airbrush a little to allow more paint through or thin the paints a little more ...

Jawsum said:

Thanks for all the previous answers, but a new bump with a new question in almost the same area! Help, anyone?

I just changed to a new airbrush, and both give the same effect. But the lower levels of paint, the ones I have masked out, are just beautiful! It's the top layer which gets the dry feel and look. Is it because of the build up?
Thanks for the long, nice answer, mate! I sure hope the satin finishing coat will make all the magic. From afar it looks ok, but when I get close, it has that "flat", dry effect, which looks off to me compared to the ref images, which are all so beautiful!